It's somewhat rare for a game to have a sense of humour - and a game that actually manages to be funny is an even rarer beast still. Comic Jumper is one such creature, with a sense of humour, and a collection of well delivered lines that'll have you genuinely laughing out loud on more than one occasion - it's just a shame how the rest of the game turned out.
A side scrolling shooter/beat 'em up, Comic Jumper puts you in the super boots of Captain Smiley, a downtrodden comic book super hero who's down on his luck. After messing up one too many times, our spandex clad hero's comic gets shut down - but thankfully, the kind people at Twisted Pixel are there to get him back on his feet, building him a secret lair, from which he can teleport into other comics, and guest star, as he builds up the funds to relaunch his own magazine.
Both the Captain, and the levels themselves look radically different as you move from comic to comic.
Thanks to his comic jumping ability (ah, we see what they did there), each set of Smiley's levels is themed around a different style of comics - from the Conan inspired Nanoc the obliviator, to Superman, and even a bizarre anime themed world each delivering a vastly different looking world. With well acted cutscenes punctuating each level, you'll at least start with a smile, as our hero, and his chest dwelling, smart talking sidekick, Star, hilariously bicker and fight their way through the levels.
The only problem is, Comic Jumper is a game that's seemingly been designed to frustrate. With no difficulty level to choose from, it's like the game has been set to "Incredibly difficult - don't even try this", in an attempt to scare everyone but the hardest of hardcore players off. While the beat 'em up sections are fine, and actually a lot of fun, as your super powers send bad guys crashing into the background and foreground, crushing giant stone tablets, or bookcases, these sections are few and far between. Had they made up the majority of the game, things would have been a lot better, but sadly, they merely punctuate the main meat and bones of the game - a side scrolling, dual analogue shooter from hell.
The side scrolling beat 'em up sections are the best part. Shame they're only about thirty seconds long.
While you can turn auto aim on, it's about as useful as a chocolate teapot, as it seems to make literally no difference at all - it certainly doesn't automatically target the enemies, as it sounds like it should. Instead, you're left to rely on your right analogue stick aiming skills to aim at, and shoot at enemies who never seem to die. Worse still, even when you've beaten the enemies once, it's not enough, as they'll endlessly respawn. If you come up against an enemy that's too hard to take head on, retreating to put some distance in between you and him may seem like a sound strategy, but in Comic Jumper, it's a surefire way to die. When you pass certain points in the level, sets of enemies are triggered into existence, whether you've already beaten them or not. If you find a particularly nasty enemy, and leg it, all you'll end up doing is spawning another ten or twenty enemies to make your life that much more miserable. All this means is your only option is to stay practically still in battles, which doesn't help, as the enemies have ridiculous levels of health, and dish out far too much damage to you, so you're left trying to make a tradeoff between jumping, and moving, trying your best to only move slightly in either direction, so as not to spawn another group of enemies.
It's not fun, and, in the tricky sections, it really turns the game into an absolute frustration, as you get enemy after enemy thrown at you that you've already beaten. When you've finished the side scrolling shooter section, most levels then seem to end with a section that changes the perspective, and turns the game into an on the rails shooter, as you slide from side to side down a giant hill, while attempting to aim at, and destroy the enemies that endlessly bear down on you. On the plus side, you can't backtrack and end up accidentally making enemies respawn, but it's still not that much better, as there's so much to watch, you end up crashing into things simply because it's so hard to judge the distance between you and the obstacles.
It's frustrating.
It's incredibly frustrating, because as much as we want to like Comic Jumper, we simply can't, because it's so stupidly difficult. It's almost as annoying as the gameplay itself, that all this could have been fixed by a simple difficulty level. By giving the, er, less talented players amongst us the ability to tone down the difficulty level, and get a challenge suited to them, Comic Jumper would have been a much more appealing prospect. As we mentioned before, games with a sense of humour are kind of rare, and Comic Jumper has a great one, that'll have you laughing out loud with a refreshing regularity. While the generous checkpoints mean it's possible to complete the levels simply through perseverance (read: dying a lot), it's entirely down to you whether you want to sit through the frustration to experience the highlights of what the game has to offer.
In the end, it's a real shame, because had the developers spent as much time making the game playable as they did making it funny, we could have had something special here.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
